The terminations of thousands of federal employees over the last week — as well as the prospect of more workforce reductions still ahead — will create ripple effects lasting well into the future.
The Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit organization focused on good government, is warning that the Trump administration’s overhaul of the federal workforce not only impacts federal employees personally, but also creates major risks of deteriorating national security and services to the public.
“We’re going to see damage for many years to come because of the actions that are being taken now,” Max Stier, the Partnership’s president and CEO, told reporters during a press conference Friday. “The people who are going to be defending this administration are career civil servants, and the people who are going to be paying for that are the American taxpayers.”
The Trump administration has described its efforts to overhaul the federal workforce as changes that will bring accountability and efficiency to government operations. But Stier said the rapid workforce reductions will, in reality, have the opposite effect.
“You have representatives driving non-strategic, very large cuts — but then you have the political leaders who actually need to run the agencies. They have agendas that, frankly, they’re not going to be able to accomplish with the dramatic and non-strategic cuts,” Stier said. “There’s not a consistent understanding about what should be happening.”
It’s unclear how many federal employees have so far been fired as a result of the governmentwide layoffs. But the Partnership estimates that over 250,000 federal employees are currently in their probationary periods, according to the most recent federal workforce data available. About 27% of probationary employees are under the age of 30.
But some of the employees who were fired within the last week were no longer in their probationary periods. The speed and depth of the terminations has led to many agencies now backtracking their decisions. The Department of Veterans Affairs, for instance, has been reinstating federal employees who were just let go. Federal News Network first reported that the VA inadvertently fired employees who were not on probation, or who were bargaining unit employees.
But Stier said for the VA, and other agencies who have made the same mistakes, the damage is already done.
“I honestly don’t think that people are waiting around. They’ve been treated so shabbily,” Stier said. “There comes a point at which you’re going to lose people — and they’ve done that. This is the worry that we have. We’re losing critical talent today and we’re destroying the brand for the future.”
The Partnership has also compiled a fact sheet detailing the intentions of federal probationary periods and offering answers to common questions from federal employees.
Fired federal employees were working to improve technology, efficiency
Several recent federal hires, who have since been removed from their positions, wrote to Federal News Network over the past several days describing the work they had been doing for their agencies. Some of the employees had been involved with the development of technology aiming to improve efficiency at their agencies.
An employee who was fired from their job at the Federal Aviation Administration, for instance, said they were in charge of automating business processes using enterprise technology, with the end goal of reducing agency costs.
“My entire role in the agency was to allow my surrounding organization to have time to innovate their processes instead of taking 30-plus hours a week to complete tedious manual processes,” the employee wrote to Federal News Network.
Another employee, who was one of the roughly 6,500 feds fired from their jobs at the IRS, said they had been using AI to help the agency process thousands of physical scans of tax documents.
“My work would have saved taxpayers millions and helped the IRS enforce the tax code more fairly and efficiently,” the employee wrote to Federal News Network.
A recent Federal News Network online survey found that 91% of federal employee respondents believe the biggest impact of the governmentwide layoffs will be on morale. But at the same time, out of nearly 7,400 survey respondents, 82% said the terminations will make it harder to recruit young and mid-career employees, and result in less work getting done.
Jenny Mattingley, the Partnership’s vice president of government affairs, said the specific types of roles that — inadvertently or not — are being affected through the layoffs make the Trump administration’s efforts particularly concerning.
“When you think about where some of the major hiring had been over the past year, it was in things like health care,” Mattingley told reporters Friday. “The VA had hired a lot of doctors and nurses for hospitals to care for veterans — they’re out in the field in medical centers.”
On top of that, agencies had been hiring for a lot of roles in cybersecurity and technology — both of which are critical skills for the federal government to have on board, Mattingley said.
“The competition for talent in the private sector for those sorts of positions is intense,” Mattingley said. “When you make government look less attractive, then you’re already going to lose out on those positions to the private sector.”
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